How to make a research lab website (a step-by-step guide for PIs)

A lab website is often the first thing a prospective student, collaborator or reviewer sees of your group. Search for any professor's name and the lab site is usually in the top three results, next to their Google Scholar profile and university page. Yet many lab sites are years out of date, because they were built once by a student who has since graduated.

This guide walks through building a research lab website that looks professional on day one and stays current afterwards.

1. Decide what the site is for

Most lab websites serve four audiences:

• Prospective students and postdocs, who want to know what you work on, who is in the group and whether you are recruiting.
• Collaborators and peers, who want your research areas and recent papers.
• Funders and hiring committees, who look for outputs, impact and an up-to-date CV.
• Your own lab members, who use it to share news, protocols and openings.

Write each page with one of these readers in mind. A short, clear site beats a long one nobody maintains.

2. Plan the essential pages

A strong research group website usually has:

• Home — one sentence on what the lab studies, a striking image, and links to research, people and openings.
• Research — three to five research areas, each with a paragraph in plain language, a figure, and key papers.
• People — the PI, current members with photos and short bios, and alumni with where they went next.
• Publications — the full list, newest first, with links to the paper and the DOI.
• News — papers accepted, awards, talks, new members.
• Join us / Openings — open positions and how to apply.
• Contact — address, email, a map.

Our article on what to put on a lab website goes into each page in more detail.

3. Choose how to build it

You have three realistic options:

• Your university's CMS. Free and on-brand, but often rigid, slow to update and hard to make look like your lab.
• A general website builder (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites). Flexible, but you start from a template made for cafés and portfolios, and publications, people and news must be typed in by hand.
• A lab website builder such as Labsite. Built for research groups: the pages above come ready-made, publications can update themselves from ORCID and PubMed, and every lab member can edit their own profile.

We compare them in the best website builders for research labs.

4. Write content people can read

• Lead every research area with the question, not the method: "How do bacteria decide when to divide?" before "We use single-cell microscopy."
• Keep paragraphs short. Most visitors read on a phone.
• Use real photos of the lab, the team and your figures. Stock images make a lab look generic.
• Put the most important call to action — usually "Join us" — in the menu.

5. Make it findable

• Put your lab name, institution and research topic in the page titles and the first paragraph.
• Give every publication its own page with the title, authors and abstract, so Google Scholar and search engines can index it.
• Link to the site from your university profile, Google Scholar, ORCID, email signature and social accounts.
• Use your own domain (for example smithlab.org) if you can; it survives moves between institutions.

6. Keep it up to date

The hardest part of a lab website is not building it, it is keeping it current. Three habits help:

1. Automate publications. Pull new papers from ORCID, OpenAlex or PubMed instead of typing them.
2. Share the work. Let each member edit their own profile and post news.
3. Review once a term. Add new members, move graduates to alumni, update openings.

The fast route

If you want all of this without touching code, create a lab site with Labsite. Pick a template designed for your field, import your existing site or start fresh, and your publications, people and news are ready to edit like a spreadsheet. Most labs are live in under an hour.